"Oh?" said Karp when she announced this. "It must have been hard to do."
"You mean Marina? Oh, no, she's quite good with her English now. She's a smart woman, actually. Lee didn't want her to learn any English, you know. He was afraid it would loosen her attachment to him."
"No, actually, I meant Oswald. His character. A very strange and complex man."
"You're joking," she replied with a charming laugh. "He was a… a… putz-is that the right word? A nonentity. Nobody at home."
"Maybe. A guy I work with says if he was such a schmuck, he didn't kill the president, and if he did kill the president, he wasn't such a schmuck."
She laughed again and put her hand casually on his knee. "Oh, God! Please don't tell me you're one of those!"
"One of what?"
"An assassination nut, silly."
Karp said, with some stiffness, "Well… yeah, I guess. I guess I'm supposed to be a kind of official assassination nut."
"So, you honestly don't think Oswald did it? Forget about the obvious defects of Warren. Let's say it was a sloppy investigation because everyone was running around terrified. The fact remains that they came up with the right guy."
Karp shrugged. "Well, they haven't proven it by me. How come you're so sure?"
"Because I'm a journalist and this is the story of the millennium. If there was anything there that was real, that couldn't be interpreted in sixteen different ways, then serious journalists would have dug it out within weeks of the assassination."
"Wait a minute!" Karp objected. "There are dozens, hundreds, of books digging at the thing."
"No, I meant by serious journalists. All these buffs-they're all lawyers, or politicians, or sociologists, or historians. Or 'experts.' None of them ever made a dime out of any writing except writing about the assassination. There's not a real hard-rock working journalist in there. Why? Because journalists are suspicious-the good ones, anyway. They check their facts. And they can read people."
She looked hard at Karp. "Just like I can see you don't believe me-you're becoming a conspiracy buff yourself." She smiled at Karp in a way he didn't much like, the smile of a mom patronizing a preschooler.
"Look," she said, "I spent hours and hours and hours with Marina Oswald. This woman is just what she says she is. Lee Oswald is just what she says he was and what every reliable record of him says he was-a bum with delusions. He's exactly the kind of person who has been the killer in every presidential assassination: Booth, the failed actor and disgruntled southerner; Guiteau, a petty office seeker with a grievance against authority; Czolgosz, an anarchist, whatever that means. Zangara, the guy who tried to kill FDR, when they asked him why he did it, he said he had pains in his stomach. Oswald was cut from exactly the same cloth. Believe me, I spent some time with the man, so I know."
"You knew Oswald?"
" 'Knew' is a little strong. I was a stringer for the Post in New Orleans in September 1963, when he was arrested and went on the radio to debate the anti-Castro Cuban. The peak of his life until then-people actually paying attention to him, the little shit. I interviewed him after the program, but he was so boring and inane that I didn't bother to write it up. What was interesting was what he told me about his wife. I thought it might be interesting to talk to a Russian defector-a defectoress, actually. I was thinking of a piece for the woman's page as we then called it, so I went to Dallas and looked her up. I did the piece, but the paper didn't use it, and weren't they sorry the following month, when Lee pulled the trigger! In any case, after the hassle died down and the FBI quit holding her hand, I renewed our connection, and did some articles and now this film." She laughed. "Who am I to criticize? I've done pretty well myself off the JFK hit."
They were silent for a moment, and then Karp asked, "And you have no problem with all the discrepancies, the lost evidence, the-I'll say apparent-cover-ups?"
"Problems? Of course I have problems!" she replied sharply. "Who wouldn't? Do I know that Lee never talked to anyone who worked for someone who worked for the CIA or the FBI? That his name isn't stuck on some obscure file? Of course not! Christ! The Hosty thing alone would cause conniptions. FBI agent Hosty visits the assassin a couple weeks before the killing, and he knows he's a nut, who threatens violence, and a political wacko, who just happens to work in a place that's on the president's motorcade route, and nobody thinks to check this guy out while the big man is in town? So were there cover-ups? Probably. But not of conspiracy; the cover-ups were about incompetence. Like I said, Warren messed up, my boy, messed up big-time, but they got the story right."
"Well, there I can't agree with you. Obviously, right? I mean that's what the House investigation is for, isn't it? To figure out what went wrong with Warren, and fix it."
She looked surprised. "Surely you don't believe that? In fact, the point of your committee is to dispose of the criticisms of Warren and come up with approximately the same results."
Karp bridled and snapped, "That's not what Bert Crane thinks."
"Yes, I know," McDowell said darkly. "That's the problem. Look-you seem like a very nice man, honest and forthright and all that, so I'm going to give you some free advice. Don't hitch your wagon to a falling star. Hello, Blake."
The man standing over them and smiling was large and built on an angular plan. His shoulders were squared off and broad, his jaw was sharply drawn, there was a sharp fine dividing a short crop of crinkly black hair, graying on the side, from a flat, smooth forehead. Below that were thick eyebrows straight across and black squarish glasses like Clark Kent's. The lines in his face and his wide mouth seemed also to run rectilinearly, as if drawn on graph paper. He wore a sharply cut, expensive dark suit, pinstriped, of course. Karp knew who he was: next to Jack Anderson and perhaps James Reston, Blake Harrison was at the time the most influential political newspaper columnist in the country.
Harrison said, smiling, "Hello, yourself, Felicity," and then said his name to Karp and stuck out his hand. Karp rose and took it, and said his own name.
Harrison said, still smiling, "Felicity, would you mind terribly if I poached a bit? I have to get somewhere and I do need to have a few words with Mr. Karp here."
"Not at all," said McDowell, her smile a trifle forced. "Nice talking to you, Butch."
Karp nodded and voiced similar sentiments, and was led away, noticing that no one had asked him. Apparently, when Blake Harrison wanted to talk to you, it was not a negotiable issue.
Karp followed Harrison out of the crowded living room and down a hallway. Harrison was hailed by several people on the way, and returned their greetings, but refused to stay for conversation. He also seemed to know his way around the Dobbs house. They reached a doorway and Harrison ushered Karp into a small room that appeared to be some kind of den: wooden bookshelves along one wall, a desk, an elaborate stereo system, sporting prints and political cartoons on another wall, two large red leather library chairs flanking a coffee table piled with magazines. Harrison sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet up on the coffee table, seeming quite at home. He motioned Karp into the other.
Harrison said, "So… Butch. They still call you Butch, don't they?"
"Or worse."
Harrison smiled briefly. "Yes, I'll bet. I'm Blake, and they call me worse things than they probably call you. Well, I could butter you up with tales of what I've heard about your reputation, but knowing that reputation as I do, I know that you have no use for flattery. So I'll get to the point. Your boss is going down. It may be this week or the next one, I don't know, but for sure he's finished. The question-"
"Why?" Karp interrupted. "What's he done?"
Harrison smiled, the same smile that McDowell had given him, the patient smile of an adult addressing the question of a child. "Why does anyone fail in Washington? He has not made happy the people he ought to have made happy, and he has made unhappy the people he ought not to have made unhappy."